15 Years Ago, I Helped Start a War That Hasn’t Ended

Image

Preparing for war: Marine Corps reservists from Syracuse, N.Y., working on their Abrams M1-A1 tank as a “Jolly Roger” flies from the radio antenna of another tank on Feb. 16, 2003, at U.S.M.C. Camp Grizzly in the northern Kuwaiti desert near Iraq.CreditCreditPaul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse

By Matt Ufford

March 20, 2018

When I deployed to Iraq in 2003, there was no war. We had to start it.

As a lieutenant in charge of six tanks (four active-duty crews, two reserve), I gave a preinvasion talk to my platoon before rolling out. It was 15 years ago, and I was 24 — older than all but two of the 23 crewmen. It was a moment I had long fantasized about, inspired by the fist-pumping motivational speeches that rouse the troops in war movies like “Gladiator” and “Patton.”

Behind a line of tanks, on a stretch of Kuwaiti sand as flat and featureless as my courage, I adopted a folksy tone. “I know y’all were probably looking forward to a big ‘Braveheart’ talk, but you know me — I’m not one to speechify.” I paused, tried to stop my voice from shaking and failed. “I’m just like the rest of you: I’ve never been to combat, so I don’t know what it’s like. But I want to tell you all that it’s O.K. to be scared.” I’m not sure whom I was trying to convince more: my Marines or myself. “What’s not O.K. is to let that fear overcome you. No panicking. We’re all well trained, and as long as we go with our training and make quick decisions, we’re gonna accomplish the mission and be fine. Tank commanders, you know what I expect.” That was it. No one responded with a battle cry.

Of the 80 or so Marines in Delta Company, First Tank Battalion, only one of us had ever seen combat: a gunnery sergeant who fought in Desert Storm. His face was creased and leathery from a decade in the Mojave outpost of Twentynine Palms, and he had the unhurried gait of a man whose cartilage was shot from a career of clambering on and off no-skid steel. Soon many of us would look more like him than our selves.

Image

A Cobra-attack helicopter circling over forward Marine positions in central Iraq in March 2003.CreditJames Hill for The New York Times

We spent the weeks before the invasion in Kuwait waiting for orders, fighting off boredom. We adjusted the sights of our tanks, banged on the tracks with heavy tools, went over the assault plan, pored through satellite imagery, cleaned our weapons, practiced speed drills with gas masks and still had more empty hours than busy ones. We joked that we wanted the war to start just for a break from the monotony.

We filled the time with card games, pranks, rumors and — occasionally, quietly — our thoughts and fears about combat. My friend Travis Carlson had a specific fear of being shot through the neck. I couldn’t decide if I was more afraid of death or of the general unknown of what waited for us once we crossed the border. Nothing loomed larger, though, than the desire to live up to the storied history of the Marine Corps. I didn’t need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the legend of Chesty Puller and his five Navy Crosses or the corps’ long list of Medal of Honor recipients, but I couldn’t let them down either.

The case for the invasion was thin — or rather, it was thick, but, we now know, filled with faulty intelligence, half-truths and a fervor for war that was unsated by the conflict in Afghanistan. Back in the United States, President George W. Bush told the nation on March 19 that it was time to free the people of Iraq and “defend the world from grave danger.” Within hours, thousands of troops, including my battalion, crossed the border to look for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Our company commander stressed that we should exact only as much harm as the mission required, but a tank is not a scalpel. When we drove across a field, newly planted crops flew skyward behind our vehicles in great roostertails of earth. When we provided supporting fire to an engineer detonating mines, we felled trees with our machine guns. Inside the tank, we hardly felt a bump when we crushed cars under our treads. We brought war everywhere we went.

The pace was relentless: a race to an objective, a brief engagement — tanks have a way of ending battles quickly — and then back on the highway. We drove all day and all night, from Basra to Nasiriyah to Diwaniyah, stopping only to refuel. Over the course of a week, I slept 10 hours. No one up the chain of command seemed to care about sleep until one of Charlie Company’s tanks drove off a bridge over the Euphrates in the middle of the night. It settled in the riverbed upside-down, and the four Marines inside died.

We doglegged east to Numaniyah, then continued to push northwest on Highway 6. That’s where my friend Brian McPhillips of Second Tank Battalion was fatally shot in the head, but I wouldn’t hear the news for another two weeks. Information rarely travels laterally in war. I was a few miles from the ambush that killed him when I learned that my platoon would lead the battalion over the Diyala River and into Baghdad.

The bridge was partly destroyed. Two-thirds of the way to the far side, a chunk of the span was gone, leaving pieces of exposed rebar and a clear view to the water below. Combat engineers laid a makeshift bridge over the gap. I asked the engineer lieutenant if it would hold a tank’s weight. “I think so,” he said.

As the platoon commander, I could dictate which tank went over first, but it wasn’t really a choice. It had barely been a week since Charlie Company’s Marines drowned in the Euphrates; I left the hatch of my cupola all the way open, prepared to jump free of the vehicle if it went in the water.

As we came over the crest of the bridge, a man on the far side of the river fired an AK-47 at us. This was inconvenient. I was trying to guide our driver onto the engineer’s bridge while scanning the landscape for other threats; being shot at felt gratuitous.

As he fired, I caught sight of a Soviet-made T-72 tank dug into a defensive position. I grabbed the override to rotate the turret while giving a hasty fire command to my gunner. The thunderous boom echoed across the battlefield, and I saw the orange spark of steel on steel. Secondary explosions followed as the T-72’s ammunition cooked off. On the radio, I reported the kills and called off the artillery mission, which was well inside the “danger close” range of 600 meters. I could feel the overpressure from the bursting shells, a concussive force that shook my cheeks.

“Hey, sir?” It was my driver. “Are those mines?”

We had driven across the bridge into a minefield. It ended up being a long day.

Image

U.S. troops keeping watch as the Ministry of Transportation burned in Baghdad, Iraq, on April 9, 2003.CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times

Baghdad fell on April 9. After the resistance on the outskirts of the city, we expected a devastating battle on urban terrain. Instead, we rolled into the capital and were greeted by cheers. It felt as if my chest might burst from relief and pride: The job was done, and all my men were alive. I had been a part of the longest inland assault in Marine Corps history.

Ten days later, First Tank Battalion left the capital; our vehicles were “too aggressive” of a posture for the peacekeeping mission to come. The occupation needed military police officers and translators; we had 70-ton vehicles with high-explosive anti-tank rounds. It seemed like a rash decision — and indeed, tanks would be a mainstay of the Marine mission in Iraq for years to come — but that didn’t stop us from whooping with excitement as we left the city. The occupation was someone else’s problem now.

Fifteen years later, the invasion is a footnote to the war, and the aftermath is filled with too much death and dishonor for me to ever regret leaving the service without another deployment. But there was a moment — before Abu Ghraib, before Falluja, before the Haditha massacre, or the Surge, or the drawdown, or ISIS — that I still cherish. On the day we rolled into Baghdad as victors, First Tank Battalion encamped in the shadow of the giant turquoise dome of the Al-Shaheed Monument, enjoying the protection of the man-made lakes around it. We were abuzz with the joy of being alive and having accomplished our mission. I shared a kettle of coffee with one of my sergeants, and I told him I wanted to come back to Baghdad one day to see what it might look like in peace and prosperity. As the sun set on a liberated city, golden light turned the dusty sidewalks to warm coral, and for a moment it felt as if the war were over.

Matt Ufford is a freelance writer and video host who served in the Marine Corps from 2000 to 2004.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.